Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In general, a telecommunication system may define an access network configured to provide client devices with connectivity to one or more transport networks such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or the Internet. Such an access network may include a policy decision point (PDP) that manages service policy rules defining service levels for served client devices, and a policy enforcement point (PEP) that enforces those service policy rules. In a typical implementation, for instance, each client device may subscribe to service of the access network and may have an associated service account or service profile defining a set of service policy rules, and the PDP may maintain or have access to each client device's set of service policy rules. When a client device registers with the access network, the PDP may then provide an indication of that client device's service policy rules to the PEP, so that the PEP can enforce the client device's service policy rules as the access network serves the client device.
Service policy rules for a given client device may define a quality of service to be provided to the client device, such as a data rate (e.g., guaranteed bit rate, maximum bit rate, or best effort service quality) and/or communication quality (e.g., voice and/or data encoding quality), as well as other restrictions (e.g., access control rules or content filtering rules) and/or allowances (e.g., entitlement to engage in certain services) regarding service level for the client device, in addition to policies regarding configuration of the access network when serving the client device. In practice, various client devices may have different service policy rules, possibly based on subscription level, device type, and/or other factors for instance.